When you grow up among mangos
it's hard to have any regard for the mulberry.

I speak from experience, of
course. For the first twenty years of my life I don't think I
ever stopped to consider a mulberry for any longer than the time
needed to transport it from plate to palate, and in its absence
I certainly never missed it the way I miss mangos when summer
is over. Ah, mangos! whose magical ability it is to blend the
Holy Trinity of taste, texture and smell into an experience that
can only be heightened by the messiness incurred in the devouring.
Seriously now -- if we are ever to be friends you must know:
no ardent mango lover eats mangos. We guzzle, gormandize
and gorge on mangos. We wolf down, stuff our faces on, gobble
up mangos. We linger over, relish every bite of, just about wallow
in mangos. We learn new languages in the dare I say it
fruitless search for words to adequately describe what
exactly it is we do to mangos, and they to us.

But you see what I mean. Mangos
overtake mulberries completely, even in the writing of a mulberry
story. Hardly surprising that for twenty years the mango consumed
the fruit- conscious part of my brain, with occasional allowances
for pomegranates. Even now, I can't remember what made year twenty-one
of my life so different; I only know that one day in 1994, while
home in Karachi for the summer holidays, I looked across the
dining table at my sister and said, "What's happened to
the mulberry crops?We haven't seen, let alone eaten, mulberries
in years. "She regarded me in silence for a moment, the
way she does when I say something particularly stupid, and said,
"Nothing's happened to the mulberry crops. I ate mulberries
this year. You're just not around during the mulberry season.
"

Oh, treachery of mulberries.
That a fruit so seemingly innocuous should be the instrument
by which the illusion of four years is shattered!Prior to this
moment, Id had no trouble convincing myself that though
I was at college in America, the fact that I returned home for
four months of the year meant I was not really missing out on
life back home. After all, I was home for at least parts of:
the crabbing season, the beach season, the monsoon season, the
wedding season; home for pomegranates, pears, oranges, apples,
chikoos, lychees, watermelons, melons and, yes, mangos. Home
for everything, I had thought, except the Cricket World Cup,
and while this was a big exception I took it as The Symbolic
Exception which rolled around once every few years, and to which
I would be able to point in later years to remind myself, "Yes,
I was in America for a time. "

Everything was so simple before
the mulberries, but after. . . What could I do but become obsessed?
I stayed awake all night trying to remember what else I had forgotten.
I raced through cookbooks, family albums, old diaries, in search
of the once-familiar made unfamiliar by absence. I spent a whole
week interrogating people about October at home and got
nothing more than the shrugged off description "it's like
September becoming November".

At some point it occurred to
me that reacquainting myself with the mulberry would be the only
sane way of reclaiming those eight lost months of the year. I
started with food magazines; but while there was plenty of space
given to berries of the straw- and black- variety, I couldn't
find a single mul- in two years of back issues. I did find an
entire issue devoted to avocado, and this incensed me immeasurably.
What has the avocado ever done to deserve such attention except
flaunt its own blandness?

Encyclopedias were my next stop,
but I only paused there long enough to see that there were no
pictorial accompaniments to the entry "Mulberry", though
in the course of flipping to "M" I had seen pictorial
accompaniments to: Brazil Nut, fan tracery, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker
and Jesus Christ. You see why I moved quickly on.

I came at last to the dictionary,
and lo and behold! in the parenthetical etymology for mulberry
I read: Middle English merberie, mulberie, fr. Middle
French moure, from Latin morum and finally
from Greek moron. "

Moron indeed, I chided myself.
A mulberry was never a mulberry to you when you ate it. It was
always its Urdu self; always shaitoot.

Shaitoot, I say out loud.

The word drips  ripe and
purple from my tongue.

About the Author

Kamila Shamsie was born and
grew up in Karachi, and has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts
at Amerst. She is the author of three novels, In
the City by the Sea, Salt
and Saffron and Kartography.
She is the recipient of a fellowship from the Arts Council of
England, has been shortlisted for the John Llewleyn Rhys/Mail
on Sunday Award, won the Prime Minister's Award for Literature
in Pakistan, and been chosen as part of 'Orange Futures' - a
promotional event by the founders of the Orange Prize for Fiction
which nominated '21 writers for the 21st century'. She teaches
creative writing at Hamilton College, NY.